There’s more than one Big Sister. For whatever reason, 2K Marin had been leading us to believe that the lithe nemesis of BioShock 2 was a lonely thing. Sure, she’d pull you through iron doors with psycho-kinetic powers, whirling you up into a violent cloud of debris before slamming you to the floor, but there was a sense that when she wasn’t nearby, she’d be sitting alone and crying, trying to read a book but skewering it with her bayonet forearms.
“As of last time we spoke,” explains Jordan Thomas, creative director, “we were talking about a Big Sister who was at the centre of the fiction. There’s still a character in whom the soul of that narrative still exists, but as BioShock 2’s narrative must exist in harmony with the gameplay, we decided to give the player that feeling of victory that comes from actually defeating this foe when she comes for you. So the Big Sisters are Sofia Lamb’s, our new villain’s, mightiest enforcers. Yet as you go through the game, you’ll learn more and more about this character who is at the centre of that fiction.”
Hopefully you’re up to speed with the terminology of BioShock, or at least enough of it to not be fazed by talk of young children syringing pints of fluid from corpses before guzzling it down like sinewy Gatorade, because BioShock 2 continues the fiction in a not at all dissimilar way. The opening part of the level we played shows just how little the actual format of the game’s changed – your train journey is impeded by a door which has been frozen shut, a shifty sounding ally (Sinclair, a protege to Andrew Ryan) tells you, via shortwave radio, that to proceed you must find the Incinerate plasmid, which is hidden deep inside a wonderfully constructed and detailed amusement park.
The amusement park’s function in Rapture is revealed to you gradually through scattered audio diaries: when the children of Rapture began to ask about the surface, Ryan decided to build this place – Ryan Amusements – to make them terrified of the world above.
The park’s centrepiece is the Journey to the Surface ride, an on-rails bathysphere trip through narrow wooden streets and cardboard shop fronts. Scenes of metaphors made real judder into motion as you pass: a menacing, giant animatronic hand tears the roof from a farmhouse to steal the farmer’s invisible income while Ryan’s crackling voice echoes the same anti-Socialist, anti-tax agenda we heard during the opening scenes of BioShock.
Subtle as a wet fart in a crematorium though all that may be, there’s still fun to be had exploring Ryan’s distorted vision of the world above the waves. Elsewhere in the park, animated dioramas cheerfully detail the history of Rapture, from Ryan’s original expedition to the laying of the foundations. It’s porn for the detail-perverts, and we love every ounce of it.
You’re also a Big Daddy. Well, an early model Big Daddy, and one not as mutated as those that went into full production. It makes little difference to how BioShock 2 handles, and it’s thankfully unlike the closing sections of the previous game. You’re as nimble as you were suitless in BioShock – the only immediately noticeable differences are in the stomping sounds you make, and your giant drill arm, which replaces the wrench as your melee tool of choice.
In fact, all of the weapons you wield are beefier than most of Jack’s armoury. Your rivet gun not only fires, well, rivets, but it’s also capable of laying down rivet traps on floors, walls and ceilings. If approached, these traps will fire rivets directly upwards, downwards or sideways through whatever unfortunate sack of organic matter that happens to get in the way.
Next, your spear gun catches splicers and lifts them off the floor, pinning them to whatever they hit next. Retrieve the spear and they fall back down. Use a rocket spear and the bolt will lodge itself in the splicer’s flesh before sparking to life, launching the victim upwards or into a mad, screaming death spiral about the room. To end the show, it explodes. As you might guess, these rocket spears are as rare as hens’ tits.
As a Big Daddy, your interaction with Little Sisters is more complex than just harvesting or saving them. You’ll come across the girls in much the same way, with their clomping protectors in tow as they flit about the abandoned hallways. A new Big Daddy type is shown, the can-faced Rumbler, who can throw down handfuls of mini-turrets.
“You didn’t see it,” claims Jordan, “but I could’ve frozen the Rumbler and hacked his turrets.”
We believe him – the number of interactions between plasmids and the environment seems to have increased. You can fire an ice plasmid at a cyclone trap to turn it into a freezing wind, capable of turning splicers into flying blocks of ice. Likewise, the Incinerate plasmid will turn a cyclone trap into a blazing tornado. And you can electrocute a flying turret to short circuit it. Do this and it’ll fall, and if it lands in water it’ll zap anyone unlucky enough to be sharing the puddle. As with the first game, there’s scope for ingenuity when coming up against Big Daddies, and the world encourages it in its placement of broken water pipes and security cameras.
As soon as you’ve carved a path to a Little Sister, your binary choice is now between harvesting and adopting her. Adopt, and she hops on your shoulder and guides you to a corpse with magical pheromone-o-vision, a glittering trail of sparkles leading you to a pre-determined body.
According to Jordan, only certain splicer remains are fit to have ADAM sucked out of their torsos, and these corpses are likely to be ones 2K Marin have chosen for us. Ones that sit in well-lit rooms surrounded by enough doors and entry-points to make the inevitable siege unpredictable. They’ll also, based on the two occasions in which we found ourselves chaperoning the macabre event, be flanked by security cameras or turrets, both of which can be hacked to turn the arena to your advantage.
